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Show Moon -107 He jerked his hand away and said, "You don't love me." She leaned toward him, gathering herself to be persuasive. "Dad. I show I love you, by planning a nice future for myself. Isn't that the way a daughter loves her father?", He put on his most sorrowful look and shook his head as if she'd just told him something terrible. "You don't love me," he said again. "But I do." "No. You don't." Tears filled his pale blue eyes. Joy thought, wildly, of the words, "Jesus wept." "Of course, I love you," she said carefully. She tried to make her voice stronger than she felt. "You're my father, after all." He thumped his fist on the table and looked as if he might begin to wail. Joy forced herself to sit calmly and not look around at the other people in the restaurant who must be noticing. She would have begged them with her eyes to help her. When James regained his composure, she almost said, "What do you want from me?" but thought better of it. There didn't seem to be a way out of this impasse. Her father wasn't asking for love; he was asking for something else-power, maybe-and there was no way to talk about that. Guernica walked into the dining area from the kitchen, and it was all she could do not to rush up to him and say, "Please let me stay here tonight." In the taxi home James kept kneading her hand as if she were clay being rolled out for the wheel. To pull her hand away would signal that she understood too much, but to surrender to his grabbing fingers would signal something worse. Finally, she removed her hand from under and placed it firmly on top of his, as if to say, "I will touch you, but only my way." |